welsch@houxu.UUCP (09/07/83)
I just finished reading an article where the author made the statement that "women should be encouraged to compete." I have very ambivalent thoughts about this statement. I would rather see the statements "women who are by nature competitive should be encouraged to compete" and "men who are by nature not competitive should be encouraged not to compete." I am speaking from the viewpoint of a man who is not competitive. There are two implicit assumptions being made by the statement "women should be encouraged to compete." The first is that competitiveness as a trait is better than non-competitiveness . Competition taken to extremes stinks and there are many situations where competition is not desirable. A classic example of where a blend of competitiveness and non-competitiveness is on teams that compete against other teams. There, the team as a whole must be competitive, but it is undesirable for individual members of the team to compete against other. On athletic teams one often hears of the leadership qualities that a player brings to a team that do not show up in the statistics or the no-name team that makes it to the playoffs. The second implicit assumption is that "if only women would change to be like men then women would succeed in this male dominated world." Yes that is probably true. I question, though, if this is desirable, particularly in with respect to a "competitiveness" trait. Perhaps, men should be trained to reward team building, helpfulness, ability to inspire, general excellence, and ability to support instead of only competitiveness. Maybe men should change to value traits commonly associated with women, whether a man or a woman has the trait. Some caveats - I am not saying that men are be nature more or less competitive than women, or that men have certain traits in greater abundance than women. That is a separate argument. I am saying that many traits associated with women are not as highly valued by "Western Culture" as many traits associated with men. I am also saying that this evaluation is in many cases wrong and that societies values should change. Competitiveness is one example. Larry Welsch houxu!welsch
laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (09/08/83)
I have been going to job interviews lately. I spent 2 hours on the phone to a person who is working with a person who described a job to me that i think that I would like. Unfortunately, i could not get the name of the company out of the Body-broker -- I truly believe that he did not know. He is very new to the boby-broking business, and was going to do a miserable job of selling me to the perspective company (which is why i spent so much time with him). After clearing up some fundamental misconceptions with him ( I had to break off a conversation to write(1) to someone, telling him that I was busy, and the BB was astonished that I would have a terminal at home -- and thought that was a gross break of security!, and I had to explain to him that compiler writing was not a gift from some deity so that i had not thought to write "I CAN WRITE COMPILERS" in 96 point on my resume, and I had to explain to him the difference between a 32 bit machine and a 16 bit machine, and that there were more 32bit machines than just the 68000... you get the picture) After leaving technical issues, he began to ask the sort of questions that can be described as 'are you a jerk to work with'. He was absolutely astonished (still, I think he found the 2 hours very astonishing given that every other sentence he said got a 'well, you can't quite say that' or a 'well that does not logically follow') when I corrected him when he said "besides helping people, what else are you in this business for?". I had not mentioned helping people, and in fact, it is not particularily important to me. it is nice when what I do helps people, and it generally *does* help them, but these days very few people are saying "oh you wonderful person, you found out that it was the Memory Bus, not the first Meg of memory that was broken", or anything of that sort. Most of the things I do are never noticed, which is fine by me. I am interested in what I do out of the sheer joy and power of it. I am exulted when I can get a piece of hardware which nobody has ever seen before and nobody is likely to see again working. This exultation is not based on a sense of 'oh boy, all these users will get a new disk to use' but on the sheer power -- I wanted this done, and look, i did it. i found that this concept boggled the poor BBs mind. He said that i was the first woman he had met whose expressed purpose in life was something other than 'helping people'. (I can believe this. 4 years ago the Ontario government did a survey of high school students and what their career expectations were and more than 80% of the girls listed 'helping people' as one of their career aims.) it occurs to me that i may have stumbled on the destinction between a 'hacker' and a 'computer professional'. A hacker works for the joy of it. Now, of course, one must ask where do all the women get the idea that they ought to spend their lives helping people -- and why did i not get it? perhaps it was because a lot of people were very nasty to me as a kid... Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
stevel@ima.UUCP (09/09/83)
#R:houxu:-19800:ima:36300004:000:589
ima!stevel Sep 8 12:49:00 1983
My statement women should be competitive was not meant to imply
they should be duking it out with other students but compete
against themselves to be competitive in school (i.e. get good
grades). Engineering isn't pre-med but it does take hard work.
Proud to be a nerd (occasionally)
that is proud to occasionally be a nerd
not
occasionally pround to be a nerd
Steve Ludlum decvax!yale-co!ima!stevel, {ihnp4|ucbvax}!cbosgd!ima!stevel,
PS Although there was a case of a student stealing posted answer
sheets. But I recall crime didn't pay and he got kicked out of
school.